Sex Au Naturel (18 page)
Authors: Patrick Coffin
The Catholic Church is opposed to all forms of birth regulation
: FALSE. Natural family planning, properly understood, involves the regulation of births. As we’ll see in Chapter Ten, the difference is that regulation is not repudiation. In his book
The Well and the Shadows
, G.K. Chesterton noted, “What is quaintly called Birth Control … is in fact, of course, a scheme for preventing birth in order to escape control.” With NFP, the couple exercises their gift of fertility in partnership with God, always leaving the baby-blessing trump card in His hands. But with contraception, God’s special participation is shunned altogether.The Bible is silent on the matter of contraception:
FALSE. See Chapter Four.Catholic teaching against contraception is fixed and cannot change
: TRUE. The teaching belongs to the deposit of the Catholic faith. Whenever the Catholic position has been attacked, as historian John Noonan notes, “the teachers of the Church have taught without hesitation or variation that certain acts preventing procreation are gravely sinful. No Catholic theologian has ever taught, ‘contraception is a good act.’ The teaching is clear and apparently fixed forever.”
11
Contrary to the fantasies of its foes, the teaching is normative for all times, an ineluctable, irreformable part of Catholicism. As Pope John Paul II told the 1988 Moral Theology Congress in Rome, “By describing the contraceptive act as intrinsically illicit, Paul VI meant to teach that the moral norm is such that it does not admit exceptions. No personal or social circumstance could ever, can now, or will ever, render such an act lawful in itself.” In other words, the wrongness of contraception is not due to arbitrary or “sectarian” decree, but to the very moral structure of human nature in its capacity to bring forth new life. The Church can no easier proclaim black to be white.
This last question was the reef against which my own ship of dissent capsized, as mentioned in Chapter Two. There is little reason to accept the Resurrection if for two thousand years the Church could teach something so cataclysmically false and misleading to hundreds of millions of couples. If what
Humanae Vitae
teaches is false, then Catholicism is a false religion—a conclusion that at least has consistency on its side.
If you peel away all of life’s nuances and subtleties, the intellectual flotsam and jetsam of rationalizations to which human nature is inclined, life comes down ultimately to only two alternatives: “either one conforms desire to the truth or one conforms truth to desire.”
12
The question of Jesus to His apostles, “Who do you say that I am?” (Mt. 16:15), rings down through the centuries to our ears. Simon Peter got the answer right in his time. Answering it rightly, and living by it, is our task in ours.
1
^
The early Reformers, with no exception, were staunchly anti-birth control. A partial list of Reformation figures and their followers who led the charge includes Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Wesley, Charles Spurgeon, A.W. Pink, Cotton Mather, Matthew Henry, and Adam Clark. Contemporary non-Catholic opponents of contraception include Allan Carlson, PhD, Pastor Matthew Trewhella, Charles D. Provan, Rick and Jan Hess, Ingrid Trobisch, Royce Dunn, Nancy Campbell, Nancy Leigh DeMoss, Mary Pride, and the Quiverfull movement (see
www.quiverfull.com
).
2
^
Quoted by Daniel Vitz in “Gandhi: What He Believed about Sex, Marriage, and Birth Control,”
GodSpy
,
http://oldarchive.godspy.com/life/Gandhi-on-Sex-Marriage-and-Birth-Control-by-Daniel-Vitz.cfm.xhtml
(accessed April 16, 2008).
3
^
Sigmund Freud,
A General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis,
translated by Joan Riviere (New York: Liverwright, 1935), 277, cited in Donald DeMarco, PhD, “Contraception and Catholic Teaching,”
http://www.catholic.net/RCC/Periodicals/Faith/11-12-98/Morality2.xhtml
.
4
^
This does not assume that souls pre-exist, waiting around up in heaven somewhere to be born. Contraception does not kill a soul for the simple reason that there is no soul to kill. Yet contraception does interrupt the natural process of sexual union and its procreative power, and it does tamper with the future lives and destinies of our progeny. If two groups of one hundred fertile couples are tracked for five years, one group using birth control, the other using NFP if they have a serious reason to delay pregnancy (i.e., they live a truly Catholic married life), the first group, at the end of five years, would have fewer children than the second. These “missing” children would have been, but are not.
5
^
Donald DeMarco, PhD, cites numerous sociological studies that verify this in
New Perspectives on Contraception
(Dayton, OH: One More Soul, 1999), 63–73. See also John Noonan, Jr.,
Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists
(New York: American Library, 1965), 614.
6
^
William B. Smith, “The Question of Dissent in Moral Theology,”
Persona, Verita, e Morale
:
Atti del Congresso Internazionale di Teologia Morale
(Roma: Città Nuova Editrice, 1987), 233.
7
^
Cf. John Kippley,
Sex and the Marriage Covenant: A Basis for Morality
(Cincinnati, OH: Couple to Couple League, 1991), 159–169; Brian W. Harrison, OS, “Humanae Vitae and Infallibility,” in
Fidelity
(November 1987), 43–48; a work in Italian by Ermenegildo Lio, OFM,
Humanae Vitae e Infallibilita: il Concilio, Paolo VI e Giovanni Paolo II
( Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1986); and John C. Ford, SJ, and Germain Grisez, “Contraception and the Infallibility of the Ordinary Magisterium,” in
Theological Studies,
Vol. 39, No. 2, June 1978, 258–312.
8
^
Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church
Lumen Gentium
(November 21, 1964), no. 25
.
9
^
For a detailed collection of medical evidence, see Paul Weckenbrock, RPh, “The Pill: How Does It Work? Is It Safe?,” The Couple to Couple League,
http://www.ccli.org/nfp/contraception/pill.phd
.
10
^
The success rates of properly utilized NFP methods for obtaining or postponing pregnancy are roughly the same. For a comparison between the Billings Ovulations Method and various artificial means, and for an informative breakdown of the financial differences, see Mercedes Urzu Wilson,
Love & Family: How to Raise a Traditional Family in a Secular World
(San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1996), 246–256.
11
^
Noonan,
Contraception
, xix.
12
^
E. Michael Jones,
Degenerate Moderns
:
Modernity As Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior
(San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1993), 11.
Chapter Eight
An Answer to Chicken Little
Too many children? That’s like saying, “Too many flowers.”
—Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta
A New Yorker cartoon shows a toddler standing in the doorway of his parents’ bedroom. He says, “I’ve had another bad dream about Social Security.” We chuckle, but the little guy spoke more demographic truth than the cartoonist likely intended.
The belief that the world is overpopulated—or soon will be—has a lot going for it. Except that it isn’t true.
While the question of whether the earth does or does not face a population explosion has nothing to do with the wrongness of contraception, it’s a myth worth exploding. For few debates over birth control get very far before Uncle Tom, co-worker Dick, or Professor Harry will bring up the “population explosion” problem and why birth control is part of the solution. Those who promote the “There Are Too Many of Us Already” propaganda are very up front about what they mean: (a) we must slow down the arrival speed of new babies (the domain of contraception and abortion); and (b) we must speed up their exit (the domain of suicide and euthanasia). Both “solutions” are alive and well, and gaining traction and respectability everywhere.
The population explosion scare is almost universally assumed to be an accurate assessment of humanity’s alleged predicament (shades of former Vice President Gore’s assertion that the debate about global warming is “over”). This chapter will show that earthlings do face a population crisis: a population implosion.
Not only have most people not heard this information, there is probably as much resistance to it as there is to the Church’s opposition to birth control itself. We will now browse the history of the overpopulation movement, review some fascinating demographic projections for the future, and provide some facts with which to explode the myth of overpopulation.
While there are a few references to the perceived need to prune overpopulation in ancient Greece,
1
the modern overpopulation bandwagon picked up speed in the year 1798 with the publication of
An Essay on the Principle of Population
, by an Anglican clergyman and economist named Thomas Malthus. The ideas contained in this work attracted many admirers, one of the earliest being Charles Darwin. Reverend Malthus’s argument boiled down to a simple proposition: The world’s food production grows arithmetically (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 …) but its population rate grows exponentially (1, 2, 4, 8, 16 …). Thus sooner or later, he argued, the human race would encounter the world’s scariest math: Too many mouths + too few carrots = inevitable mass death by starvation.
Malthus was convinced that overpopulation caused poverty, disease, and war, and that all social remedies were doomed to fail unless the torrent of new children into the world could be halted for a time. It may be true that overpopulation could have occurred already if it weren’t for famines, pandemics, wars, natural disasters, historically high rates of infant death, celibate clergy, and the like. But as Dr. Halliday Sutherland wrote in 1920s England:
The truth of these facts is indisputable, but it is a manifest breach of logic to argue from the fact of poverty, disease and war having checked an increase in population, that therefore poverty, disease and war are due to an increase of population. It would be as reasonable to argue that, because an unlimited increase of insects is prevented by birds and by climatic changes, therefore an increase of insects accounts for the existence of birds and climatic changes.
2
Reverend Malthus argued that there were two main ways to avert the coming disaster: by exercising moral restraint through abstinence, or by indulging in vice. (Christians living in pre-Lambeth England understood vice to mean contraception.) While Malthus was not wrong in his predictions of population growth, his food catastrophe never arrived. Famines have, indeed, appeared in certain areas for certain periods since then, and the horrible phenomenon of starvation still exists in some parts of the world. But the rise of agricultural technology and the development of new ways to produce and distribute high-quality foods, and the unforeseen decline of birth rates since the mid-twentieth century, have sharply contradicted his dire predictions.
Among Malthus’s latter day protégés, the most famous is American biologist Dr. Paul Ehrlich. His book
The Population Bomb
, which appeared the same year as
Humanae Vitae
, is a bible of 1960s enthusiasms. In it, he rails against U.S. hegemony and imperialism, the pesticide DDT, corporate greed, and proffers feverish arguments on behalf of federal laws requiring explicit sex education in public schools prior to junior high school. As you would expect, Ehrlich stridently promoted an unlimited abortion license, which came down five years after his book came out.